COMPANY BACKGROUND

Arla Foods is a farmer-owned European dairy cooperative headquartered in Aarhus, Denmark. It’s owned by 12,700 dairy farmers, around 3,000 of which are in the UK. It is also home to some of Europe’s leading dairy brands, including Cravendale, Anchor, Lurpak and Tickler.

CHALLENGE

Arla Foods used an inventory SAM solution but was unable to connect all their dairies into a centrally managed system, making software licensing complex and expensive.

BENEFITS AND ROI

Significant amount of time saved managing licenses

Quicker response time for recognizing licenses

Better access to data for generating compliance reports

THE STORY

Arla Foods dates back to the 1880s, operating 70 dairies worldwide with core markets in UK, central Europe, Sweden, and Denmark. With 20,000 employees, 10,000 clients and more than 3,000 physical and virtual servers worldwide, Arla Foods has a vast estate that needs to be managed centrally.

Prior to choosing Snow Software, Arla Foods used a SAM solution from an IT Asset Management vendor to manage its large estate but found connecting all its dairies into a centrally managed system was overly complex, especially given each of the 70 dairies operate their own decentralized IT environments.

This made it difficult for Arla Foods to accurately determine whether they were getting value for money from their software investments, or if they were over-spending on key vendors and applications. With software, a major spend for the organization, they needed a solution that offered better visibility of software installs, usage and expenditure.

Arla Foods’ objective was to find a solution that was not only cost effective but also offered high levels of license optimization automation. After an evaluation program, Arla Foods selected and implemented Snow License Manager, which stood out for its intuitive and user-friendly interface.

“Licensing is a complex challenge for Arla Foods because of the geographic and departmental spread of our users and devices. From a central perspective, having a system that is able to categorize and present data in a compelling way is important, as it gives us that central control we need without adding further complexity,” explains, Jan Lynge Jakobsen, Senior IT Specialist, License and Procurement at Arla Foods.

Jan is responsible for generating quarterly Effective License Position (ELP) reports to ensure the company can demonstrate that it’s meeting compliance requirements, should there be an audit from a key software vendor. However, there is also a need for more stakeholders in the organization to generate reports and get insight into software spend in their own department or dairy. Snow License Manager enables more people to access the data, with a user-friendly interface that makes the process easier. The ease of use offered by Snow License Manager means that Jan can also consider rolling out reporting insights to wider management usage in the future too, widening the positive impact of the system to the broader business.

To date, Snow License Manager is being used to manage the software and license optimization across 9,500 clients with a further 500 to be added as the roll-out continues. The implementation process has been smooth without delays or issues.

AUTOMATION SAVES LEGWORK

To make license recognition easier, Arla Foods also opted for Snow Software’s Recognition Service. This takes the legwork out of recognizing and understanding which software applications have been installed across the 70 dairies, recognizing applications from more than 60,000 software publishers and starting the moment audit data is imported from the inventory solution into Snow License Manager. Now, Jan has the ability to spend much less time managing licenses, as the Software Recognition Service provides daily updates and supports automatic license recognition via Snow License Manager. This adds significant value to the business as IT resource is freed and allocated to more strategic projects.

The solution has been well received across the dairies. This is a huge achievement as the managers who are responsible for IT across the 70 dairies tend to avoid installing solutions that they find difficult to understand or use.

Overall, Snow License Manager has given Jan and the wider Arla Foods group the control and ability to manage multiple software vendors, licenses and devices across the 70 dairies.

IN THE FUTURE

Having taken control of software licensing, Arla Foods is now considering how further process automation can drive efficiencies and savings across the dispersed IT environment. Snow Automation Platform can be used to automate application delivery, license re-harvesting and resource allocation. This will benefit both the individual dairies and the wider Arla Foods organization.